Hello All,
Thought this could be of interest:
William Morris HUGHES (1862-1952) Prime Minister of Australia from 1915-1923. Born London
of Welsh parents, emigrated in 1881.
Source: 101 Great Australians by S.E. TOTTENHAM.
Also:
"Little is known of his father, William HUGHES, a carpenter and joiner. William
HUGHES was a pillar of the Welsh Baptist Church at Moorfields in London, a deacon,
'always immaculately dressed' and 'with the manners of an old world
gentleman'. In politics, he was a working class tory, a carpenter with an admiration
for Disraeli, one of those millions of working men who, throughout Europe, were lending
support to the new right-wing political parties with which the old rulers were summoning
emergent democracy to their advantage. His job was in the House of Lords.
HUGHES was born within walking distance of his fathers workplace, at Pimlico, on 25
September 1862, of a mother who was a domestic servant before, at the age of 37, she
married the House of Lords' carpenter. Her own family, the Morrises, were not working
class, but small farmers running two adjoining farms on the Welsh side of the English
border; they were Church of England people. William Morris HUGHES was 7 when his mother
died and he spent most of the next five years with the Morrises - during schooltime with a
MORRIS aunt in Llandudno, who ran an apartment house, and at holiday time with a MORRIS
aunt on the farm on which his mother was born, where he was remembered as a lively, if
fragile little boy, keen to get on, alert, likely to question things, always asking for
reasons why. By his own account, although an only child robbed of a mother and passed
from aunt to aunt (but perhaps petted and cosseted by them) these were the happiest years
of his life."
Source: In Search of Billy Hughes by Donald Horne.
Ruth